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This past July, it had been a year since Lisa-Maria Kellermayr, a young Austrian physician, committed suicide. Because of publicly speaking out for the COVID vaccine, she had been targeted with email threats, which included detailed descriptions on how she and her employees would be killed. Kellermayr went to the police. They, however, simply told her to stay out of the public eye and keep quiet. But Kellermayr would not shut up. As the death threats continued and her fear grew, she hired a security guard, thus greatly increasing her debts and finally having to close down her newly opened practice.
The response Kellermayr received from police regarding the email threats was a very typical response. The same protective laws we know from our physical world often don't apply to the online world, and police usually aren't trained on how to respond to such email threats or online hate posts. In addition, it is incredibly difficult to identify the author(s) behind such anonymous online threats. Common advice to victims therefore is to just ignore the emails or posts and to become silent.
I shared Kellermayr's story last year, right after her suicide. I wrote that the shock over her suicide deeply affected Austria and resulted in a police investigation. The email traces led to Germany, but investigators were unable to identify the perpetrator(s). The case was dropped this past January, and the initial shock of her suicide seems to have subsided as well. I came across an interview with residents of Seewalchen am Attersee, the municipality in the Austrian state of Upper Austria, where Kellermayr had her practice. One interviewee stated people didn't talk much about Kellermayr anymore. Another one claimed it had all been Kellermayr's own fault, characterizing her as an odd person who lived a withdrawn life. Another interviewee said as a physician, she should have been able to handle such death threats. In other words, some interviewees put the blame on Kellermayr, thus diminishing the death threats she'd received, as well as the months of anxiety she'd experienced.
Blaming the victim is a typical phenomenon as well. Many people don't understand what it means to regularly receive emails that tell you exactly how you're going to be killed. On top of that, you don't know who that person behind those emails is. Also, you don't know how seriously to take that person. Will they actually go through with what they've been describing in such great detail? And this is not just about you. That person also fantasizes about killing your employees for whose safety you are responsible.
It's surprisingly easy to email such threats or to post hateful messages online. To many of us, the internet world doesn't appear as real as the physical world. People who use hate speech forget that the person who receives their hateful messages is a real human being with real feelings that can be hurt and fears that can be instilled by their hateful comments. Sitting behind a safe screen and keyboard makes people bolder. It's a very different experience to tell a person to their face how you want to kill them and to see the terror in their face than to do so in typing, far away from that person, in the shadows of anonymity. Today, literally anyone can send anonymous emails or anonymously post hateful comments online.
The German investigative journalist Oliver Das Gupta did a documentary on Kellermayr titled Der Fall Kellermayr, which translates as "The Kellermayr Case," that aired on Austrian TV this past summer. During his research, he was contacted by Chan-Jo Jun, an Asian-German attorney who believed the same person who had threatened Kellermayr had also been threatening him. Das Gupta shared the email threats addressed to Kellermayr and Jun with forensic linguists. The linguists analyzed the overall writing style of the emails, checked for words that would identify the region where the author was from, and looked for reoccurring grammar or spelling errors. Their findings did indeed suggest that both the emails to Kellermayr and the ones to Jun had likely been composed by the same person. Unlike Kellermayr, however, Jun hadn't spoken out for the COVID vaccine. Instead, he'd been fighting fake news and hate speech in videos he posted online. The perpetrator apparently had a huge problem with people who didn't share his view and dared to voice their dissenting opinion in public.
People who use hate speech justify doing so by referring to their right of freedom of expression. The purpose of their hate speech, however, is to silence those who speak out in public and whose opinions don't reflect theirs. Like Kellermayr and Jun, their victims are primarily women and members of minority groups. If the victims are then told by police the best course of action is to become silent and to keep their opinions to themselves, the perpetrators reach their goal: the victims can no longer exercise their right to free speech.
Das Gupta's research has produced new evidence for police to reopen the Kellermayr case. Time will tell if police investigations will be successful in finding the perpetrator this time. Regardless of the outcome, however, we ought to ask ourselves if we really want to live in a world in which, as Jun told Das Gupta in the interview, hatred and hostility have become "commonplace." I know I certainly don't.
Dr. Daniela Ribitsch, a native of Austria, is a resident of Lock Haven.